Since launching Loose Leaf 5 months ago, I’ve learned a lot about how to get an app in front of its target audience, and everything I’ve learned would’ve been exponentially more powerful if I’d known it pre-launch instead of post-launch. That’s exactly why I’ve written and open sourced the App Launch Guide for indie devs.

This guide is perfect for developers who’ll be working on both the marketing and development of their apps, with the goal of helping make sure nothing is missed in the run up to launch. And while I’ve learned a lot about marketing, I certainly don’t know everything, so I’ve opened this guide into the public domain and posted to Github so that the indie dev community can iterate on this foundation for a more organized launch plan for all of us.

This guide goes through:

List of valuable resources and books

Narrowing all your app ideas into The One

Validating the idea by finding initial interested audience

Choosing a revenue model for the app

Defining a Minimum Viable Product

Align marketing milestones with development milestones

Nearly every item in this guide has been written about at length elsewhere – the real purpose of this guide is to bring all of these ideas together into a single timeline. It’s very easy to start tangible product development much earlier than the less tangible marketing plan. This guide helps align the marketing timeline with the development timeline, so that you’re only spending valuable development time after proving traction with your audience.

Why on earth would I do this?

Loose Leaf took me over 2 years to build, and the vast majority of that development was closed off from feedback – I didn’t start showing my work until well into the 2nd year of development. If I had it to do over again, this is the biggest thing I’d change – early feedback is incredibly important.

So I wanted to try something different and build an app extremely quickly: I gave myself just 2 weeks to build an app from scratch and submit it to the App Store. I also wanted to build the app completely in the open – a contrast to Loose Leaf’s closed process. I thought it’d be fun to have 100% of the code be open source from day 1, and to also have 100% of the code built on stream.

It could be fun for viewers to participate in feature decisions, and might serve as an interesting “This is what mobile development is really like” for developers thinking about working in mobile.

So how’d it go?

Surprisingly well! I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d be able to ship something respectable in just 2 weeks, but I think the v1.0 turned out well. Across the 17 streams, there was just 24 hours of development throughout the 2 weeks, and our version 1.0 was feature complete! The best part – all of the testers who’ve given feedback have really enjoyed the app – it’s the first game I’ve ever made, and I’m glad it turned out to be a fun one 🙂

The stream has also brought a fair amount of attention to the project. CNN Money recently wrote about livecoding.tv – the site where I’ve streamed the development – and included some quotes and a photo from yours truly! ITWorld also wrote up an article about the project which was very fun to see. For such a short app experiment, it’s already brought in some considerable attention!

What did I learn?

When I started Loose Leaf development three years ago, I believed that the value was in the code I was writing. I’ve learned that’s very rarely the case – the real value is in the community you build around your project. During those 2 years of development, I missed the biggest opportunity, which was to build and bring a community with me during that dev process.

As I continue to work on Loose Leaf, Spare Parts, Remotely, and other apps – yes, I’ll be coding – but more importantly I’ll be focused on encouraging the community around each of these apps. I’ve been so used to coding in my own silo until everything is perfect – it’s been eye opening to learn how to include others in the development process, even when nothing is built, polished, or even decided.

“So how do you get 100k downloads for your app?” you may ask. If you’d asked me three months ago, I’d have no idea. Arguably I still have no idea since we got just under 100k downloads this past weekend, but let’s round up for today – I’m celebrating!

The short story: do new things constantly.

Three Months

These past 3 days couldn’t have happened without the three months before them. After last November’s launch, I started reading Traction. The book outlines 19 different marketing channels that could work for any company, and it encourages brainstorming and prioritizing how every one of them could be used.

I took it to heart and started working my way through my own spreadsheet of ideas. At the time of writing, I still have 50+ ideas in the spreadsheet – it’s a system not a goal.

Three Days

When I started working with Steve in late February, one of the ideas he brought was to make Loose Leaf free for just 1 weekend. The goal for the weekend would be 20k to 40k free downloads tohelp prove traction for the app, validate our target market, and jump start a community of users.

Steve’s strategy here is simple:

It only makes sense for paid apps, the higher priced apps work even better

It requires at least some traction already

Plan to go free for just 1 weekend

Pitch specific sites about the high price app going free

Dropping a paid app with some validation to free for a very limited time can be an effective pitch to high traffic app deal sites. For the free weekend, we pitched three different sites, and on Friday we got picked up by just one of them.

On Saturday morning, 1 day into the free weekend, Loose Leaf had barely over 4k downloads. Traffic grew throughout Saturday, and the related tweets got it picked up by AppAdvice, which brought even more traffic. We also started to rank in the App Store’s top free productivity apps, and all of the combined traffic brought in over 58k downloads that day! This continued into Sunday for an additional 33k downloads, totaling over 96k for the weekend!

It’s very safe to say this has been a wild success! We were able to get Loose Leaf in front of a large audience, measure conversion rates, A/B test the website, and jump start a strong community of users and start hearing their valuable feedback. The biggest take away was connecting with lots of new users and validating and tuning our target market.

Three Lessons

1. Small problems become big problems with lots of users

Before the weekend, I only knew of very rare and difficult to reproduce bugs in the app. With this many people using the app, even rare bugs becomes immediately obvious. Crashlytics has been invaluable for reporting problems in real time, and thankfully shows problems hit a small % of users.

2. Measure. Measure. Measure.

Going into the weekend, I was prepared to measure as much as I possible. Mix panel and Google Analytics were setup on the site to track demographics and conversions and A/B test different site layouts. Mixpanel was also integrated into the app to anonymously track average session duration, tool usage, and which tutorials pages were effective. This is a huge help both for which features to work on and where to focus our marketing energy.

3. Brainstorm and keep trying new things

This weekend happened because of the three months of brainstorming and work that led up to it. Today was that validation to keep pushing, keep moving, and keep running the marathon. I still have 50 ideas to push through on my Traction spreadsheet, and by the time I’m done I’m sure I’ll have thought of 50 more.